Obamacare surge provides 11th-hour ‘relief’ for enrollees

A year ago, when Adelina Dicicco struggled with conflicting advice on how to lower her high health insurance bills, she was a “nervous wreck” trying to decide whether Obamacare was a solution or a mistake.

As she emerged on Monday from a last-day Affordable Care Act enrollment forum in Clinton Township, Dicicco said the outcome was a “wonderful” new health care policy.

Dicicco was among hundreds of thousands of people across the nation who created a surge of Obamacare enrollees as the hours ticked down toward the midnight deadline. Reports indicated a tsunami of procrastinators deluged government-run online exchanges and the ACA call-in center, creating last-minute computer glitches.

An influx of up to 1.5 million visitors over the weekend through noon on Monday at the federal healthcare.gov exchange led to a lag in its ability to handle new applications, but those technical problems were resolved.

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Dicicco attended an event at a Macomb Intermediate School District computer lab where navigators provided by the nonprofit group Enroll America were on hand to help people with online sign-ups. In the mid-afternoon first hour of the event, about 30 people had enrolled on the healthcare.gov exchange.

A part-time clerical worker, Dicicco secured a “Gold Plan” for her and her semi-retired husband that cut their $930 monthly premiums to $520, with a deductible of just $750 annually.

“If I didn’t come here today, I’d still be a nervous wreck,” she said. “I’m so relieved right now, you can’t believe it.”

Her navigator, Diane DeNault Gladden of Downriver Community Services in New Haven, said too much anxiety was inflicted on potential Obamacare enrollees by misinformation distributed with a partisan, political tinge.

“Those who criticize have not gone onto the website to see the plans available, what’s covered or what the deductibles are,” Gladden said. “It’s all about you, your family size, and your geographical area.”

It will be weeks before the official enrollment tallies are available following the close of enrollment. In addition, people in some categories who have experienced difficulty securing a plan will be given a short deadline extension.

A new poll released by the health care consumers group Kaiser Family Foundation discovered that the uncertainty surrounding the ACA has caused more than half of the nation’s uninsured – numbering between 30 million and more than 40 million – to sit out the first year of Obamacare.

In turn, the 11th-hour push toward nationwide enrollment of nearly 7 million people, which was the Obama administration’s original goal, would represent a remarkable turnaround from October’s disastrous launch of healthcare.gov and several state-run exchanges, whose dysfunctional computer systems were unable to enroll meaningful numbers of people for nearly two months after the Oct. 1 launch.

The ACA also suffered from a torrent of bad publicity in November and December when it was revealed that very few people in the small slice of the market who purchase coverage individually would lose their existing policy and have to start from scratch. Even after the president extended the enrollment deadline for those in this sector, many complained that the new policies that met Obamacare standards imposed extraordinarily high deductibles of $5,000 to $10,000 each year.

Meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill insisted on Monday that the rocky road traveled by Obamacare could not possibly have resulted in such a last-month comeback. One GOP senator, John Barrasso of Wyoming, suggested on Monday that the Obama administration was cooking the books to make the ACA numbers look good.

Those who did not enroll on time or will lose their coverage by failing to pay their upcoming premiums will have to wait until the next enrollment season that begins Nov. 15, which will offer coverage beginning in 2015.

However, some little-known exceptions exist that will allow an off-season enrollment if a household experiences a sudden change in income or an alteration in family circumstances, such as a marriage, a divorce or a baby.

Shawn Dhanak, a spokesman for Enroll America, said those seeking coverage with the help of a knowledgeable navigator to traverse the healthcare.gov landscape mostly fared well, choosing a policy that provided their preferred balance between premiums and deductibles.

“The great thing about the (ACA) marketplace,” Dhanak said, “is it provides unprecedented consumer choice so that consumers can choose which plan fits them best.”